Installation

ADI installs like any other desktop app: download a file, run it, click through a couple of prompts. What comes up is a local DNS resolver, a front door, and a control panel in your browser — nothing to sign into, nothing running anywhere but this machine.

Before you start

Platform	You need
macOS	macOS 13 (Ventura) or later — Apple Silicon or Intel, one file covers both
Linux	Any x86-64 distro. The binaries are statically linked; nothing else to install first
Windows	Windows 10 or 11, x64

Self-hosted, and what actually leaves this machineEnterprise interest

There’s no account and no server behind this: everything above runs as a local process on the machine you install it on, and works fully offline except for two things that reach out on purpose — checking https://github.com/adi-family/mono for a newer release, and whatever an agent you configure calls out to. An agent talking to Claude, GPT, or any other hosted model sends its conversation to that provider over the network, exactly as any other client of that API would — ADI itself doesn’t phone home, doesn’t store anything off this machine, and doesn’t ask you to log into anything to use it. See Secrets for how a credential an agent uses is stored, and Hive for why the front door only ever binds loopback addresses.

Install

macOS

1. Download ADI.dmg from the latest release — one universal file, notarized by Apple.
2. Open it, drag ADI onto Applications, and launch it from there. (Launch it straight off the disk image instead, and ADI’s first screen offers to move itself for you.)
3. Two permission prompts, each once: Local names (lets .adi addresses resolve on this Mac) and Network access (lets ADI answer them on port 80). Each asks for your Mac password.
4. Flip the ADI services switch on, then click Open control panel.

Expert area Before opening it, you can check what you downloaded is what Apple actually signed:

spctl -a -t open --context context:primary-signature -v ADI.dmg
# -> accepted, source=Notarized Developer ID

Linux

1. Download adi-linux-x64.tar.gz from the same release page.

2. tar -xzf adi-linux-x64.tar.gz
   cd adi-linux-x64
   ./install.sh

3. In an interactive terminal it asks a couple of questions (where to put things, whether to fetch bun for dashboards); run it non-interactively (ssh node ./install.sh) and it takes the defaults for both instead. Either way it finishes by printing the control panel’s address. No root is needed, and nothing is opened for inbound connections — not even briefly.

On Linux, that address is http://127.0.0.1:<port> — the .adi route isn’t installed for you here the way it is on macOS and Windows, because it means binding :80, and a routine install script has no business fighting whatever your Linux box already runs there. If you want http://app.adi too, run this once:

adi-mono dns install-route

It asks for sudo once, checks first that nothing else already answers on :80, and prints the exact command to run by hand if it can’t ask you directly. Skip it, and the panel just stays at the loopback address install.sh printed — nothing else about ADI is different. DNS and the front door has the full story on why this one step exists only here.

Windows

1. Download ADI-Setup-x64.exe from the release page — not the .zip beside it, which exists only for the auto-updater (see below).
2. Run it. The installer isn’t code-signed yet, so Windows will say “Windows protected your PC” first — click More info → Run anyway, then click through. It installs into your own user account, so the install itself raises no administrator prompt. One step inside it does ask for administrator, once: pointing the .adi namespace at the local resolver. Say no and everything still works, at http://127.0.0.1:<port> — set the domain up later from ADI’s tray icon.
3. Open ADI from the Start menu. It starts the platform, opens the control panel, and stays in the notification area by the clock — click the icon any time to reopen the panel, right-click it to start, stop, or quit.

What a first run starts

However you got here, adi-mono up (run for you by the installer, or by ADI itself on launch) is what actually starts the platform: the DNS resolver for .adi, the front door that proxies *.adi addresses to whatever’s actually running, the control panel, and a background agent that checks for updates every few hours. Each is supervised separately — a launchd LaunchAgent on macOS, a systemd --user service on Linux, a Task Scheduler task on Windows — and restarted if it dies. None of it needs to be started by hand again; a reboot or a re-login brings all of it back.

Confirm it’s up

adi-mono --version
adi-mono status

status prints one line per service. With .adi routing on, expect something close to:

DNS — Running · resolves .adi names on this machine (127.0.0.1:15353) [running]
App — Running · http://app.adi (127.0.0.1:8000) [running]

Without it — Linux before dns install-route, or a Windows install where you said no to the admin prompt — the second line reads http://127.0.0.1:8000 (.adi not routed) instead. The panel is exactly as up either way, just not at that hostname yet.

The panel

Open http://app.adi (or the loopback address status just printed). What’s there is the same web app on every platform and every machine: a chat at /, a setup step if this is the very first run, and the fuller workbench at /extended. The top bar carries a version chip — hover it for what it last checked, click to check again — and, only once one exists, a button offering the next release.

Updates and removal

Updating. ADI polls the published release for a newer version every few hours in the background, and the panel’s version chip offers a button the moment there’s one. Clicking it opens the release’s changelog and asks before touching anything — Install or Not now — because taking an update restarts every service on the machine. Manually:

adi-mono update check   # compare installed vs published, install nothing
adi-mono update run     # install if newer, restart, roll back if the services don't come back

Two checks run before anything is swapped in: the download’s checksum against the published manifest, and on macOS the new bundle’s code signature against the same check Gatekeeper would run. If the services aren’t all back within 90 seconds of a swap, ADI restores the previous install and restarts onto that instead.

Removing it. Every platform separates the program from your data — projects, agents, secrets, the database, every run’s transcript — which lives under ~/.adi (%USERPROFILE%\.adi on Windows) regardless of what you do to the program:

• macOS — flip the services switch off (or adi-mono disable), run adi-mono dns remove-route to give back the .adi route and the port-80 grant, then drag ADI from Applications to the Trash.
• Linux — adi-mono disable stops and removes the systemd units; adi-mono dns remove-route first if you’d run install-route; then delete ~/.local/adi (or wherever --prefix put it).
• Windows — Settings → Apps → ADI → Uninstall, or Uninstall ADI.exe in the install folder. It stops the services, unregisters them, gives back .adi (one more administrator prompt), takes ADI off your PATH, and removes the install folder.

None of the three touch ~/.adi. Reinstalling picks your projects and agents straight back up; delete that folder yourself, on top of the above, if you want nothing left at all.

Make something

adi-mono projects add hello --description "the first thing I made with ADI"

Open /projects in the panel — it’s there, with its own task badge, the moment the command returns.

Projects covers what a project actually organizes; Agents covers how to point one at this project to do something in it.